The communication scheme to be a successor of W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), that is, long-term evolution (LTE), has been set forth by 3GPP, which is the standards organization of W-CDMA, and, for radio access schemes, OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) has been employed on the downlink and SC-FDMA (Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) has been employed on the uplink. Presently, 3GPP is studying the successor system of LTE (referred to as “LTE-Advanced” including Release 10 and including versions after Release 10). LTE-Advanced hereinafter will be abbreviated as “LTE-A.”
The LTE system is a system to perform communication by sharing one, two, or a greater number of physical channels by a plurality of mobile stations UEs, on both the uplink and the downlink. A channel that is shared by a plurality of mobile stations UEs is generally referred to as a shared channel (or also referred to as “data channel”), and, in LTE, is the PUSCH (Physical Uplink Shared Channel) on the uplink or the PDSCH (Physical Downlink Shared Channel) on the downlink.
In a communication system using shared channels such as the LTE system, to which mobile stations UEs the above shared channels are allocated needs to be signaled per transmission time interval (TTI) (or per subframe in LTE). The PDCCH (Physical Downlink Control Channel) is defined as the downlink control channel to be used for the above signaling. A mobile station UE receives the PDCCH and performs blind decoding, thereby extracting downlink control information for that mobile station UE. In LTE, the search space, which defines the resource range where a mobile station has to perform blind decoding, is defined in order to reduce the load of blind decoding on the mobile station. The base station signals downlink control information for the mobile station by arranging the downlink control information in the search space. The mobile station UE does not subject the whole range of the PDCCH to blind decoding, and performs blind decoding only on the search space in the PDCCH, and acquires the downlink control information for the subject station.